I ended up buying this lens while looking for the Pentax K28mm f2, which is a clone of the Distagon. The reason I wanted it was for shots like these; although I knew it suffers a bit from coma, the small(ish) size of the front element for such a fast wide lens was what attracted me to it; I've found that lenses with large front elements distort much more when shooting through the 'plane windows. I'm very pleased with this lens, on the ground too, and would have kept it even had it not worked out for these aerial shots.

These are all images made by blending two exposures, one for the sky and one for the ground. All except the last one are consecutive or near consecutive exposures, with the stars in the correct place. All are shot at f2.8 on the A7s.

This one is the first time I have managed to get a reasonable shot of the Milky Way from the air. Unfortunately this was the best shot of lights on the ground I managed when shooting the Milky Way.

This one was done by combining two of the above images. Although I like how it looks, I don't like that the sky is not correct; it's about 70 degrees out, and the ground was captured on the return flight, whereas the Milky Way was captured outbound.

These shots are imo only possible using a mirrorless camera, partly due to size, but also because I can see what exposure I am going to get on my phone; Sony have an amazing remote app that runs from an Android phone, allowing me to leave the camera on a Gorillapod once I've focused the lens. I'm still hoping Pentax will release a FF mirrorless camera at some point. Being able to use pretty much any lens I want, the benefits of EVF, and apps that run on the camera, mean I could never go back to a Dslr.

Thanks everyone it keeps me awake on those long night flights It's also been interesting in that, as I have to use MF, older lenses are working much better than newer ones for this type of photography.

I am waiting to see what the A7siii brings in terms of even better low light performance.

aliengrove wrote:Thanks everyone it keeps me awake on those long night flights It's also been interesting in that, as I have to use MF, older lenses are working much better than newer ones for this type of photography.

I am waiting to see what the A7siii brings in terms of even better low light performance.

Yup, I hope they introduce an even better 12MP sensor. instead of just adding newer electronics to the existing one